The GEORGE consortium gathered in at the UPC Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya campus in Vilanova i la Geltrú, Spain, on 11-13 November 2025, for its three-day annual meeting, bringing together partners from across Europe to review progress and plan the final phase of the project. With new sensor deployments, data management, and upcoming field missions on the agenda, the meeting marked an important moment as GEORGE moves towards its last 18 months.
Strong progress and excellent review feedback
Partners reported promising advances in sensor innovation, platform integration, and recent fieldwork. The project’s second periodic report received exceptionally positive feedback, and the consortium has celebrated lots of other successes in 2025, including a demo cruise to the Porcupine Abyssal Plain Observatory in June and Technical Forum II in October.
A major focus of the meeting was data management. As GEORGE’s new technologies generate new data, partners discussed consistent metadata practices, deposition responsibilities, and long-term accessibility. To support this, the consortium is developing a Roadmap for Interoperability to guide handling of GEORGE-specific datasets. The roadmap’s initial gap analysis was presented for feedback.
Preparing for the Northwestern Mediterranean demonstration
The consortium also reviewed planning for the upcoming Northwestern Mediterranean multi-RI demonstration, GEORGE’s final large-scale opportunity to test interoperability and produce a comprehensive joint dataset. Team composition, technical needs, and cruise logistics were discussed alongside preparations for Technical Forum III, a training session for engineers, technicians, and scientists in working with GEORGE’s new technologies and data workflows.
“The meeting gave us clear overview of the technical readiness level (TRL) of each technology. Seeing them progress makes me feel confident that the consortium has succeeded in creating a solid foundation for the next generation observations”, Dr Janne-Markus Rintala, coordinator of GEORGE says.
During the meeting, a short survey was made among partners to see what they see as the biggest achievement of the project so far. This survey highlighted the project partners’ commitment towards shared goals.
“I was pleased to see that many partners valued the joint collaboration between the Research Infrastructures. During the proposal writing we set a mutual goal: a joint data flow. Since then, we have realised how big challenge that really is. Yet, during this meeting, it was agreed, that this was the purpose for the Multi-RI deployments, instead of having smaller, individual trials. Thus we set a mutual goal high and during this meeting we agreed that we would proceed and work towards showing this joint data flow with a manuscript to be ready for for internal review by Easter 2027 with the data gathered from these multi-RI deployments: PAP and western Mediterranean Sea. I see it as the key goal for this project and I couldn’t be happier than having this as the main outcome of the Annual Meeting 2025”, he continues.